Collab-Or-Ate

There have been several news articles recently the awkwardness of blending personal and professional lives. Recent college graduates are realizing that party pictures do not help them get jobs and employers are looking online with more and more regularity to see what their employees are sharing. The WSJ describes a larger phenomenon of coworkers blurring the line and sharing too much with their coworkers, say around the watercooler. I disagree with the point this article makes though about coworkers not being friends. True, coworkers != high school friends, but at least with a portion of your coworkers, you do have an affinity towards them and you do share aspects of your non-work life with them.

On Wednesday, 2:30pm at CHI 2010 (in Regency 5), Anna Wu and I will be presenting a paper that touches on this topic. Anna and I spent last summer figuring out which user behaviors on Beehive indicate that two IBMers have a strong or weak relationship, and then further determining which behaviors reflect a professional versus a personal closeness. As you might expect, many behaviors on the site indicate general closeness, but a few are reflective of personal closeness only. Come to our talk to find out the details! (or, read the paper.)

A Wu, JM DiMicco, DR Millen. (2010) “Detecting Professional versus Personal Closeness Using an Enterprise Social Network Site.” Proceedings of CHI 2010, April 2010.

Updated 3/24/10: The lazyweb works! List is much improved.

I want to compile a comprehensive list of related work done on understanding how people use social networking tools at companies. Do you know of any additional research on the use of social software by employees? Please let me know.

I’m looking for papers that study social network sites (SNSs) and other social software (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, microblogging) and how employees use them. The criteria is that the site has to have a profile page with a user’s articulated social network and the user has to be using it as part of their work life.

Publications on the use of social software inside the workplace:

A Wu, DiMicco, J.M., Millen, D.R. (2010) “Detecting Professional versus Personal Closeness Using an Enterprise Social Network Site.“ Proceedings of CHI 2010, April 2010.

Barnes SJ., Böhringer M, Kurze C, Stietzel J (2010) Towards an understanding of social software: the case of Arinia. Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-43), Koloa, Kauai, Hawaii.

Blaschke, S. & Stein, K. (2008). Methods and Measures for the Analysis of Corporate Wikis. Proceedings of the 58th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), May 22-26, Montréal.

Böhringer, M. & Richter, A. (2009): Adopting Social Software to the Intranet: A Case Study on Enterprise Microblogging.
Proceedings 9. fachübergreifende Konferenz Mensch und Computer (M&C 2009), Berlin.

Brzozowski, M. WaterCooler: exploring an organization through enterprise social media. Proc. Group 2009.

Brzozowski, M., Sandholm, T., and Hogg, T. Effects of feedback and peer pressure on contributions to enterprise social media. Proc Group 2009.

Chen, J., Geyer, W., Dugan, C., Muller, M, Guy, I. Make new friends, but keep the old: recommending people on social networking sites. Proc. CHI 2009.

DiMicco, J.M., Millen, D. (2007) “Identity management: Multiple presentations of Self in Facebook.” Note, Proceedings of the ACM GROUP Conference, Sanibel Island, FL, Nov 2007.

DiMicco, J.M., Geyer, W., Dugan, C., Brownholtz, B., Millen, D.R. (2009) “People Sensemaking and Relationship Building on an Enterprise Social Networking Site.” Full Paper, Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS ‘09), January 2009.

DiMicco, J.M., Millen, D.R. (2008) “People Sensemaking with Social Networking Sites.” Sensemaking Workshop, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 2008.

DiMicco, J.M., Millen, D.R., Geyer, W., Dugan, C. “Research on the Use of Social Software in the Workplace.” Workshop on Social Networking in Organizations, Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2008), November 2008.

DiMicco, J.M., Millen, D.R., Geyer, W., Dugan, C., Brownholtz, B., Muller, M. “Motivations for Social Networking at Work.” Proc CSCW 2008, San Diego, CA, November 2008.

Dugan, C., Geyer, W., Muller, M., DiMicco, J.M., Brownholtz, B., Millen, D.R. “It’s All ‘About You’ – Diversity in Online Profiles.” Note, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2008), San Diego, CA, November 2008.

Ehrlich, K., Shami, S. Microblogging Inside and Outside the Workplace. Proc. ICWSM ‘10.

Farzan, R., DiMicco, J.M., Brownholtz, B. (2009) “Spreading the Honey: A System for Maintaining an Online Community.” Full Paper, Proceedings of the ACM GROUP Conference, Sanibel Island, FL, May 2009.

Farzan, R., DiMicco, J.M., Brownholtz, B. (2010) “Mobilizing Lurkers with a Targeted Task.” Proceedings of the 4th Int’l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM ‘10), May 2010.

Farzan, R., DiMicco, J.M., Millen, D.R., Brownholtz, B., Geyer, W., Dugan, C. (2008) “Results from Deploying a Participation Incentive Mechanism within the Enterprise.” Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 2008.

Farzan, R., DiMicco, J.M., Millen, D.R., Brownholtz, B., Geyer, W., Dugan, C. (2008) “When the experiment is over: Deploying an incentive system to all the users.” Symposium on Persuasive Technology, In conjunction with the AISB 2008 Convention, Aberdeen, Scotland, April 2008.

Freyne, J., Jacovi, M., Guy, I., Geyer, W. Increasing engagement through early recommender intervention. Proc RecSys 2009.

Fuchs-Kittowski F, Klassen N, Faust D, Einhaus J (2009) A Comparative Study on the Use of Web 2.0 in Enterprises. Proceedings 9th International Conference on Knowledge Management and New Media Technology, Graz.

Geyer, W., Dugan, C. Inspired by the Audience – A Topic Suggestion System for Blog Writers and Readers. Proc. CHI 2010.

Geyer, W., Dugan, C., DiMicco, J.M., Millen, D.R., Brownholtz, B., Muller, M. (2008) “Use and Reuse of Shared Lists as a Social Content Type.” Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 2008.

Guy, I., Jacovi, M., Shahar, E., Meshulam, N., Soroka, V. and Farrell, S. Harvesting with SONAR: the value of aggregating social network information CHI ‘08, ACM, Florence, Italy, 2008.

Happel H, Treitz M (2008) Proliferation in Enterprise Wikis. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (COOP’08).

Hasan, H. and Pfaff, C.C., The Wiki: an environment to revolutionise employees’ interaction with corporate knowledge. In Proc OZCHI ‘06 (2006), 377-380.

Holtzblatt, L., Damianos, L., and Weiss, D. Factors Impeding Wiki Use in the Enterprise: A Case Study. Proc. CHI 2010, ACM Press (2010)

Hsu, C.-L. and Lin, J. C.-C. (2008) Acceptance of blog usage: The roles of technology acceptance, social influence and knowledge sharing motivation, Information & Management, 45, 1, 65-74.

Ip, K. F. R. and Wagner, C. (2008) Weblogging: A study of social computing and its impact on organizations, Decision Support Systems, 45, 2, 242-250.

Jackson, A., Yates, J.A. and Orlikowski, W. Corporate Blogging: Building community through persistent digital talk. Proc. HICSS ‘07 (2007).

Kim, S.T., Lee, C.K. and Hwang, T. Investigating the influence of employee blogging on IT workers’ organisational citizenship behaviour. International Journal of Information Technology and Management, 7, 2 (2008), 178-189.

Kuhn, S. SelectMinds Abstract for CSCW 2008 Workshop: Social Networking in Organizations. Workshop on Social Networking in Organizations, Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2008), November 2008.

Millen, D.R., Feinberg, J. and Kerr, B., Dogear: Social bookmarking in the enterprise. In Proc CHI ‘06 (2006), 111-120.

Muller, M.J., Freyne, J., Dugan, C., Millen, D.R., & Thom-Santelli, J. Return On Contribution (ROC): A metric for enterprise social software. Proc. ECSCW 2009.

Muller, M.J., Millen, D.R., & Feinberg, J. Information curators in an enterprise file-sharing service. Proc. ECSCW 2009.

Richter, A., Koch, M. Challenges of the Use of Social Networking Services in (German) Enterprises. Workshop on Social Networking in Organizations, Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2008), November 2008.

Richter, A.; Ott, F.; Kneifel, D; Koch, M. (2009): Social Networking in einem Beratungsunternehmen.
In: Proceedings 9. fachübergreifende Konferenz Mensch und Computer (M&C 2009), Berlin.

Richter, A., Riemer, K. Corporate Social Networking Sites – Modes of Use and Appropriation through Co-Evolution. 20th Australasian Conference on Information Systems, 2009.

Romeo, P. The D Street Case Study. Workshop on Social Networking in Organizations, Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2008), November 2008.

Shami, N. S., Ehrlich, K. and Millen, D. R. Pick me! Link selection in expertise search results. In Proc. CHI 2008, ACM Press (2008), 1089-1092

Shami, N. S., Ehrlich, K., Gay, G. and Hancock, J. T. Making sense of strangers’ expertise from signals in digital artifacts. In Proc. CHI 2009, ACM Press (2009), 69-78

Skeels, M.M. and Grudin, J. When Social Networks Cross Boundaries: A case study of workplace use of Facebook and LinkedIn. Proc. GROUP 2009, ACM Press (2009), 95-104.

Stein, K. and Blaschke, S. (2009). Corporate Wikis: Comparative Analysis of Structures and Dynamics. In Hinkelmann, K. and Wache, H., editors, Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Professional Knowledge Management, Lecture Notes in Informatics, pages 77–86, Bonn. Gesellschaft fu ̈r Informatik.

Stein, K. and Blaschke, S. (2010). Interlocking Communication: Measuring Collaborative Intensity in Social Networks. In Memon, N. and Alhajj, R., editors, Social Network Analysis and Mining: Foundations and Applications. Springer, Berlin.

Steinfeld, C., DiMicco, J.M., Ellison, N., Lampe, C. (2009) “Bowling Online: Social Networking and Social Capital within the Organization.” Full Paper, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T 2009), State College, PA, June 2009.

Thom-Santelli, J. and Millen, D.R. Learning by Seeing: Photo Viewing in the Workplace. Proc. CHI 2009, ACM Press (2009), 2081-2090.

van Ham, F., Schulz, H., DiMicco, J.M. (2009) “Honeycomb: Visual Analysis of Large Scale Social Networks.” Full Paper, Proceedings of INTERACT 2009, Uppsala, Sweden, August 2009.

Yardi, S., Golder, S., Brzozowsi, M. Blogging at work and the corporate attention economy. Proc CHI 2009, ACM Press (2009).

Zhang, J., Qu, Y., Cody, J., Wu, Y. A Case Study of Micro-blogging in the Enterprise: Use, Value, and Related Issues. Proc CHI 2010, ACM Press (2010).

The most-emailed NYTimes story today is about online profiles and privacy: “How Privacy Vanishes Online”. This article highlights the futility in adjusting privacy controls:

In social networks, people can increase their defenses against identification by adopting tight privacy controls on information in personal profiles. Yet an individual’s actions, researchers say, are rarely enough to protect privacy in the interconnected world of the Internet.

You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.

Something we’ve been thinking about lately are the people you actually forgot you friended. You may have had a brief interaction with them which was meaningful in the moment, so led to immediate friending, following or exchange of contact information. But as time and space increased, you forget the specifics of the interaction and when you look at the person’s name it doesn’t trigger a memory for you. Have you looked at your friend lists lately and can you remember who everyone is? What are you revealing about yourself to those people? Do you mind sharing your life with non-familiar strangers? On the flip side, are you keeping up with the lives of any total strangers just because they are on one of your friend lists? (If you can’t relate at all to these issues, maybe you have a better social memory than I do? Or you are more selective in your friending from the start?)

I find this to be a particular problem for me on LinkedIn because I meet people at professional conferences and then never see them again. Another aspect of this is if the stranger is an infrequent posters (or limits the visibility of their posts), then there is nothing to remind me that I’m following them. They are silent wallflowers that may or may not be observing my posts.

Let’s say you go through the effort to pick out these strangers on your friend list. Then there is the whole issue of not wanting to offend these people by de-friending them. What if this total stranger remembers your meeting and hopes to reconnect again? What if they have been following your updates and when you defriend them are painfully aware you have removed them? Or what if they have no idea who you are either, and is just too polite to de-friend you? Awkward!!

The general upset about Google Buzz is interesting to me. One of the objections I’ve read is that email is always private and status messages are always public and never the two shall meet. It is wrong to mix these two types of communication.

What I find really interesting about this argument is that there are no fundamental truths about how online communication must happen. Why is email private? Because it has been since the 70’s? Why are status message public? Because that is twitter’s default setting? Status messages can be private (e.g. protected tweets) and emails could be public (maybe that’s what blogs are). These private/public distinctions are pretty arbitrary in my mind. Sure, I assume that the email I send today is private because that is how my email software behaves today, but I can imagine email environments that don’t operate this way.

Google also has enough market share and influence that the way they design their applications can fundamentally change how we think about email and status messages. If Buzz takes off, we may look back a few years from now and have trouble remembering that there used to be a clear distinction between emails and status messages. It is all just communication with our network after all.

Since I know my blog readers are sophisticated social media users and don’t need advice on this topic, this is only of marginal interest, but I’m quoted in this article on How to Decline Facebook Friends Without Offence.

I’m a co-organizer of this workshop at CSCW ‘10, that will be held February 6th. Consider submitting a paper and join us for the discussion. The position papers are due November 20th.

Collective Intelligence In Organizations: Toward a Research Agenda

Workshop webpage: www.parc.com/ciorg

CSCW workshop descriptions: http://www.cscw2010.org/program/workshops.php

When: 6 February 2010

Where: Savannah, Georgia, USA

Description

A new generation of web tools is penetrating organizations after successful adoption within the consumer domain (e.g., social
networking; sharing of photos, videos, tags, or bookmarks; wiki-based editing). These tools and the collaborative processes they
support on the large scale are often referred to as Collective Intelligence (CI).

This workshop will focus on CI tools for collaboration in work-related settings, especially for task forces now increasingly common
in industry and government. The workshop is aimed at refining the problem, summarizing pioneering work on CI in general (i.e.,
exemplars of practices and tools), and ultimately developing a research agenda that specifically addresses the problem of
supporting CI among knowledge workers in organizations. Participants will present studies of task forces suggesting specific design
requirements, CI tools, and/or new methods for empirical or design research on CI.

Call for Participation

The workshop aims to assemble a diverse set of participants with a research or practitioner interest for CI in organizations. Workshop
participants should submit either a position paper (1500-2000 words) or extended paper (up to 8000 words) reporting more substantial research.

Topics of interest include:

– Empirical studies of work practices in organizations: e.g., case studies of task forces illustrating practices and design requirements
– Designs of new software tools or proof-of-concept prototypes supporting CI in task forces, communities; or in-depth evaluations
of tools already deployed that support CI in organization
– Theoretical contributions on collective intelligence, crowd sourcing, and community-based learning in organizations, which can directly
inform design and research
– Cases of multidisciplinary research showing the interplay between field studies, analysis of requirements, and development of CI tools

Dates

– 20 November 2009 — submissions should be sent as a PDF or Word attachment to ciorg@parc.com [2-3 researchers will review each submission; based on a shared evaluation scheme, the reviewers will assess the significance of the contribution, its relevance to the workshop themes, and its clarity]
– 18 December 2009 – notification of acceptance [accepted paper titles will be posted here and shared through a wiki]
– 6 February 2010 — workshop to take place [participants will be asked to prepare a brief summary and read all accepted position papers prior to the workshop]

Workshop Organizers

Gregorio Convertino, PARC

Antonietta Grasso, Xerox Research Centre Europe

Joan DiMicco, IBM Research

Giorgio De Michelis, University of Milano – Bicocca

Ed H. Chi, PARC

Due to the arrival of a certain Baby DiMicco on Oct 6th, I now only get things done if they take me less than 5 minutes to complete. During one of my five minutes today I was able to skim the Most Emailed Stories on the NYTimes, and now I’m trying to use another one of my five minutes to share the links with you. We will see how long this takes me to write!

• 5 Easy Steps to Stay Safe (and Private!) on Facebook Impression management guide for Facebook hits the NYTimes. “When the President of the United States warns schoolchildren to watch what they say and do on Facebook, you know that we’ve got a problem.” Uh, yes! Glad this is now considered a mainstream problem.
  
  
• Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers Consumers = Producers! Of the next feature set! This is also not news for a Twitter user, but I like it.
  
  
• And since I still have a few minutes, apparently, here’s some self-promotion: I was interviewed by the Financial Times about Beehive (now called “Social Blue”) and the podcast is available. On the Financial Times’ podcast page, it is the Oct 20th podcast.

I spent (wasted) a full week back in April on connecting the right versions of Django, Python, and Postgres together on my Mac (running OS 10.5.7). Now it is September and on a whim, as if I had nothing better to do with my time, I decided to upgrade Python from 2.5 to 2.6, somehow forgetting what a mess this caused last time. Everything broke! Here’s how I put it back together, losing just 1 day this time. Hopefully next time I’ll just read this blog post and either stop in my tracks or use these commands.

First install MacPorts. Back in April this is the path that worked for me for getting Postgresql 8.3 and Python 2.5 talking to each other. It installs software, including dependancies, and then figures out how to get everything to hook together.

Today, to upgrade python from 2.5 to 2.6, you type this MacPorts command:

> sudo port install python26

Then you have to tell your machine that 2.6 is the version you want it to use:

> sudo python_select python26

Then you have to reinstall your current installation of django so that it is attached to 2.6, not 2.5

> cd to-your-Django-install
> python setup.py install

Now you have to reinstall that darned psycopg2 connection between Postgres and Python

> sudo port install py26-psycopg2

That last step can take forever, but be patient, because after this step, you can go back to your Django project and type:

> python manage.py runserver

And it will run your application! YAHOO.

A final last step: configure your Eclipse environment is to tell it to use 2.6 for compilation. Within the Pydev perspective, right-click on your project, click PyDev – project type, and under Interpreter click on “Click here to configure an interpreter not listed.” Then add a new Python Interpreter, which took some poking around, but finally “/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framwork/Versions/2.6/bin/python2.6″ worked (but isn’t what is finally displayed in the window).

Helpful resources:
- Stack Overflow is a pretty useful site and this post helped: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1213690/what-is-the-most-compatible-way-to-install-python-modules-on-a-mac
- MacPorts download site: http://www.macports.org/
- Some terminal commands I found useful
> sudo port installed (tells you what you have installed)
> locate psycopyg (tells you where you have this driver installed — about 1,000,000 places in my case)

Later this month at Communities & Technologies 2009, findings on Beehive and social capital will be presented. I did this research with Chip Steinfield, Nicole Ellison, and Cliff Lampe, colleagues at Michigan State. Chip, Nicole and Cliff have done tons of research on Facebook, found in their interesting set of papers.

The four pictures shown here are from Beehive and show IBM employees all around the world going bowling. There are so many pictures just like this shared on Beehive, highlighting coworkers informally socializing and having fun together. In terms of social capital, we hypothesized that this type of informal sharing and communicating on Beehive could be associated with closer bonds with coworkers and increased access to distant colleagues.

By adapting the survey instrument Chip, Nicole and Cliff use for measuring Facebook intensity and social capital to the IBM & Beehive context, we found that even with limited use of Beehive, over a relatively short amount of time, there are associations between types of usage and different types of social capital:

• When someone is using Beehive for meeting new contacts, they report a greater interest in making these types of contacts at the company in general.
• When someone is using Beehive for keeping up with known colleagues, both in their workgroup and in their extended network of loose ties, they report having closer ties with their immediate network (bonding social capital), a higher sense of citizenship (willingness to help the greater good of the company), and greater access to both new people and expertise within the company.
• And finally, the more intensely someone uses Beehive (meaning more frequent visits and stronger associations with the community on the site) the higher they report their social capital is, across all measures. They have closer bonds to their network, they have a greater willingness to contribute to the company, they have a greater interest in connecting globally, have greater access to new people, and a greater ability to access expertise.

The paper is Bowling Online: Social Networking and Social Capital Within the Organization and the official abstract is below:

Social capital facilitates knowledge management in organizations by enabling individuals to locate useful information, draw on resources and make contributions to the community. This paper explores the relationship between social capital and use of an internal social network site in a multinational organization. We hypothesize that SNS use contributes to social capital within the organization by enabling users to form networks of heterogeneous contacts and maintain and deepen existing relationships. Survey findings show that bonding relationships, sense of corporate citizenship, interest in connecting globally, and access to new people and expertise are all associated with greater intensity of SNS use.

The full conference program includes a lot of interesting papers.

I’ve been invited to Enterprise 2.0 to participate on a panel called Lessons Learned From Internal Communities. It will be moderated by Peter Kim and here is the abstract:

Forget the theory. Proof exists that internal communities work. Today’s media continues to hype the rise and fall of public social networks, leaving many managers to question whether community has a business application. However, smart companies have already implemented internally focused collaboration platforms that offer the best of external functionality with the appeal of a network with dedicated business focus.

This session will highlight the lessons learned from three professionals who are responsible for internal community efforts: Joan DiMicco from IBM Research, Jamie Pappas from EMC, and Patricia Romeo from Deloitte.

I’m excited for it because myself, Jamie Pappas from EMC and Patricia Romeo from Deloitte are going to share the stories we’ve heard and seen first hand from our respective internal social networking communities (Beehive, EMC One, and D Street). When the three of us have chatted we’ve discovered that many of the IBM, EMC and Deloitte stories are the same:

• High adoption rates: employees use these sites more than traditional intranet directories and information repositories
• Viral adoption and word of mouth drives adoption, more so than top-down requirements and instructions to join.
• Appropriate behavior: each company has thought through issues of inappropriate content in detail and provides guidelines to the users, but for the most part (we’re talking ~99.9%), employees know what is right and wrong to say on these company-internal tools
• The list of benefits of these tools goes on and on, centered around the theme of people connecting with each other. Some of our top benefits:
  • humanizing the workplace
  • finding informal information
  • expertise location
  • assisting new hires and acquired employees integrate
  • crossing information silos
  • providing a forum for employees to share their opinions with management.

If you’ll be at Enterprise 2.0, please stop by! (The panel is Tuesday, June 23, 1-2pm.)

I was going to write this great step-by-step guide to getting Windows applications running on a Mac when I discovered those instructions have already been written by Apple: Boot Camp Installation and Setup Guide. I highly recommend reading and following them! (I didn’t and had to start the whole process over twice.)

In the end, here’s what I did:

1. using the Boot Camp Assistant already installed by default on my Mac, created a 10 GB partition on my Mac for Windows.
2. started from within BCA, installed Windows XP on that partition. (This is where the Apple guide comes in very handy.)
3. rebooted a dozen times while Windows did its thing with all the updates and patches and what-not. (All the things you didn’t think you’d ever have to deal with again because you live on a Mac now.)
4. on the PC, installed the PC applications I wanted (SPSS in this case)
5. on the Mac, installed VMWare Fusion so that I can run the PC partition from within the Mac partition. (VMWare Fusion does the same thing as Parallels.) At this point the PC was running within a single window on the Mac.
6. clicked on that amazing “Unity” button within VMWare Fusion, and voila, the PC applications are now running along side my Mac applications.

Mission Accomplished: a PC-licensed copy of SPSS is living along side a Mac-licensed copy of MSOffice (Excel and Word).

Tomorrow, at the ACM Group conference, Rosta Farzan, PhD is going to be presenting a paper on the work we did together last summer.

R Farzan, JM DiMicco, B Brownholtz. (2009) “Spreading the Honey: A System for Maintaining an Online Community.” Full Paper, Proceedings of the ACM GROUP Conference, May 2009.

Last summer, when Beehive had been running for a full year, it had plenty of content — 100,000 pieces of content, in fact. So we realized the problem on the site was not generating new content, but rather finding the existing, interesting content. This problem is usually tackled in a few different ways: by displaying lists of recent content and most-viewed content (which we already did on Beehive) and by asking users to rate or vote on the best content.

We decided to design a custom system that encouraged a larger group of users to participate in the process of rating content than one usually sees in standard rating systems. We did this by picking a rotating board of users that has the power for one week to give “honey” to content they liked. Each board is picked based on their activity on the site and you can’t serve on the board more than once every four weeks.

We feel strongly that having a diverse group of users involved in selecting the best content brings a richness and diversity to the promoted content that reflects more of the IBM community. Because the Beehive community is large (>50,000) and IBM is even larger (>300,000), we didn’t want to have a small, and in some ways elite, group of enthusiastic raters driving up the visibility of a small set of content. Rather, we wanted to have the power to promote content distributed over a larger group, over a longer period of time.

To find out more about the system and, IMHO, impressive results, read the paper! The screenshot to the right is what you see on the home page of Beehive every time you log in and it shows you the content that this week’s “honey bees” picked as the best of the best.

My blog is a Wordpress blog and I have been running into issues (bugs) with my Wordpress plug-ins. The manifestation of the bug is that I can’t log into my blog — kind of annoying and a showstopper. The only way to fix it is to disable all the plug-ins. So now I’m leery of all my Wordpress plug-ins and looking for alternatives, so I don’t have to reinstall any of them. Enter twitterfeed! To keep my Twitter followers up to date on my blog posts, twitterfeed is perfect.



My other current favorite little tool is foxmarks. I have it running on my work laptop, my old work laptop, and my home desktop. It not only syncs bookmarks but also saved passwords. So I can log into my blog from my home computer with my obscure auto-generated password, even though I’ve never done it from this computer before and I don’t know what the password is.

I’ll be talking for five minutes at O’Reilly’s Ignite Boston 5 event, tomorrow (Feb 12). Can you guess which time slot I have? 7:15pm. I’m personally looking forward to hearing what the 7:45pm speaker says though.

I can’t believe this, but the page doesn’t say where the event is being held! It is at Hooley House near Faneuil Hall, at 25 Union St, Boston, MA, 02108

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